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Oak Hill
and The Martha Berry Museum
Rome, Georgia
Oak Hill and The Martha Berry
Museum is located in Rome, GA, and includes the Colonial
revival home of Martha Berry, founder of Berry College.
Our gardens, and their design, coincide with a 1927
renovation of Martha Berry’s house.
Robert Cridland, a Philadelphia
landscape artist, formalized four of the five gardens
surrounding the house. His landscape designs represented
early-twentieth-century landscaping trends that accompanied
the revival of Colonial architecture. Compartmentalized
gardens, separated by shrubs or walls, while a Victorian
trend, carried over into the twentieth-century.
The use of classical statuary
and fountains, along with ponds and sundials laid within
a panel of greenery were popular designs for elaborate
gardens. Sunken gardens included central grass panels
surrounded by a wall or perennial border. A garden area
was almost always surrounded by a wild garden composed
of "carefully planned tree groups with wild flowers,
groundcover, and bulbs underneath."
Cridland created four separate gardens, each with distinct
features: a formal garden, a sundial garden, a flowered
path, and a goldfish garden. A few years later, in 1933,
a sunken garden was added to the estate grounds. Furthermore,
Cridland devised a landscape plan that created a long
and meandering drive way entrance into the home so that
people arrived at Oak Hill after traveling along a path
lined by oak trees. His alterations adhered strictly
to contemporary twentieth-century gardens.
The efforts he made in creating a harmonious landscape
complemented Oak Hill’s Colonial revival architecture
and exemplified Martha Berry’s love and appreciation
of nature and beauty. In the late 1970s, Blalock and
Associates, an Athens Landscape firm, redid several
of the plantings and flowerbeds in the gardens.
Today, the gardens are maintained by Berry College students
under the supervision of Oak Hill’s grounds keepers.
Oak Hill and The Martha Berry Museum is open Monday-Saturday
from 10am-5pm. We are located at 24 Veterans Memorial
Highway, Rome, Georgia. For more information call 1-800-220-5504,
ext 0 or 2. You can also view our website at www.berry.edu/oakhill.
More information visit www.berry.edu/oakhill
Send us your Story:
YourStory@AmericanGardenMuseum.com
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